The 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference takes place in Minneapolis next week. It is the largest gathering of people who work in the nonprofit sector and technology. This conference will be my 13th one – and every year it is a like a family reunion. Registration is still available, but you can’t make it register for the online NTC and catch a few sessions.

I have the honor of designing and facilitating three sessions, including a plenary on my favorite topic – learning from failure.

Join us for a discussion about the value of failure in the nonprofit technology sector. You’ll hear a lot of F words flailing in this highly interactive plenary session – fearless, frameworks, fundamentals, forgiveness, forward-looking, and most importantly FUN! Through lively sharing and discussion we will dive into the art of placing small bets or affordable losses that can lead to innovation. This highly interactive and engaging community conversation will look at how nonprofits can create a culture of experimenting, testing, learning and correcting. Beth Kanter will facilitate this session with a panel of nonprofit tech leaders and the community – and special surprise guests who will join us via video.

I had a blast designing this session to make interactive and invite lots of audience participation on the back channel. The speakers bring great perspective to the topic and we will have a lot of fun with this topic.

This session will explore ways that we can maintain our focus by using visualization techniques such as mindmapping, sketchnoting, and others. I’ll be joined by Jana Byington-Smith and Rob Cottingham (who draws those awesome Social Signal cartoons) for this fun, interactive, and hands-on session. And to prove the point that you don’t have to be a Picasso to use visual note taking techniques, I’ve brought my markers and sketchbooks out of the closet. We’ve designed this session to be hands-on and will have available lots of magic markers as prizes.

This session will be brains on and hands on and cover the best practices of content curation for nonprofit. I had the pleasure of designing this session with Will Coley – who interviewed the best content curators in the world and get them share their best practices.

I’m especially looking forward to learning from these sessions by colleagues:

Teresa Crawford and I hope to meet up with folks doing International training after the Friday evening happy hour and will also host a “Birds of a Feather” table at one of the lunches. Leave a comment if you do training internationally and want to do a “trade craft” informal session.